Hi there! I've been running Trisquel for about a year now.
For the last week or so my computer has been running slowly. Programs take longer to load, actions take longer to perform, etc.
I ran a system monitor and saw crazy spikes in CPU usage. Memory usage was normal. So, I chalked it up to one of my programs hogging CPU power or something and figured the next system update might fix it. The slowness was tolerable so I wasn't overly concerned.
Last night things took a turn for the worse. When I went to unlock my computer screen, the option never came up for me to type in my password. It was stuck on the background screen. I tried rebooting and that seemed to "work." The startup was really sluggish, though, and that scared me. I attempted to perform a backup. That, too, was very sluggish. It's a slow process normally but this was extra slow. It was working, however and so I decided to go to bed in the hopes that it would be finished by the time I woke up.
Well, when I woke up today the auto-screen lock had kicked in and it wouldn't let me unlock it. So, I rebooted. It wouldn't boot at all.
I checked how far my backup came along on the external HDD on a different computer. It probably only got about 50% of the files.
At this point, I don't know if the problem is with my CPU/Motherboard or if the HDD is toast. I've put in a live USB and it loads. It is very sluggish though. Even when I get to the screen that allows me to F10 into boot options, it takes a long time to load. But, once in the live USB is seems to be fairly quick. So, I'm just confused all around.
While I do have full backups of my HDD they are somewhat old and I'd really love to be able to salvage things.
So, right now the two things I'd like to do is figure out what the problem is and hopefully salvage the files on the HDD.
If I try to let it boot up without the live USB, it gives me this error "reboot and select proper boot device"
Note, I haven't made any changes to my BIOS or tinkered inside my box, so this confuses me.
Any help you can provide in this matter would be greatly appreciated!
